James T. Farrell

A Portrait of James Connolly

I. The First Irish Marxist

The Irish national revolution can be viewed as a
historical laboratory of the so-called national question. As the Irish
rebelled, or threatened to rebel again and again during the nineteenth
century, the movement included elements from various classes and groups
within the country. To be sure, it is a commonplace to state that a
national revolutionary movement comprises elements from more than one
social class; nonetheless, this commonplace must be stressed in any
study of the Irish national revolution. Just as there has been unity,
there has also been disunity. Differences within the Irish movement
have often been focused in terms of an opposition between the social
question and the political question, interpreting the latter to mean
the central aim of achieving national sovereignty or independence.

The Irish movement was energized by the Great French Revolution. The
United Irishmen, organized at the end of the eighteenth century, were
directly influenced by the men of the Great French Revolution. Wolf[e]
Tone, a leader of that period, would serve as but one illustration of
this fact. John Mitchel, one of the strongest and bravest figures of
1848, was condemned as a felon and deported to the far Pacific. Even
though there was a strong conservatism and aristocratic feeling in his
nature, even though he defended the South against the North in the
American Civil War, he nevertheless showed a Jacobin streak. One might
say that Mitchel suggested both the tory socialist and the Jacobin.
Michael Davitt, one of the leaders of Parnell’s party, continued the
tradition of these rebels. James Fintan Lalor, the hunchback, who was
one of the most fiery and eloquent of all nineteenth-century rebels,
based his thinking on the events of the Great French Revolution. And he
was also encouraged by the revolutions of 1848 on the continent, as
when he wrote:

“Mankind will yet be masters of the earth.
The right of the people to make the laws—this produced the first
great modern earthquake [the great French Revolution] ... The right of
people to own the land—this will produce the next. Train your hands,
and your sons’ hands, gentlemen of the earth, for you and they will yet
have to use them.” [1]

Men such as Lalor and Davitt did not separate the social
and the political question. Involved in the thinking of the major Irish
rebels was an acceptance of the dignity of the individual which flows
out of the traditional ideas of individualism. The Irish rebels were
painfully aware of the degradation of the Irish people: they saw and
knew the conditions of squalor and misery which were forced upon them.
Mitchel saw the corpses of those who starved in the famine; he saw the
wretched laden famine ships leaving for other lands. In Ireland, we can
clearly see one of the psychological derivations of conditions of
oppression and injustice. Poverty and a lack of sovereignty in a poor
nation create attitudes of dependency. Except in rare moments of
revolutionary momentum, the poorest sections of the masses of the
people usually develop dependent attitudes. Robespierre, in one of his
great speeches, declared that the Jacobins desired to create a nation
in which men would rise “to the full stature of humanity.” The poor
usually fail to attain anything approximating that full stature. And
the Irish rebels did not need to indulge in psychological theorizing in
order to know about facts such as these. They grasped truths like these
in their direct contacts with the Irish people. In this way, the notion
of attaining manhood was linked with the idea of rebellion. In other
words, rebellion offered them the road to manhood, not only for
themselves, but also for the Irish people as a whole. On the one hand,
they wanted to lead the Irish on the road to freedom; on the other
hand, they saw the differences between themselves and the great masses
of their fellow Irish. By rebellion, they were finding the way to the
fullest possible attainment of their own manhood: feelings such as
these served to link their personal experiences with their reading of
Irish history. And those who saw most clearly realized that the
attainment of their ends required consideration of the social, as well
as of the political question.

At the present time, there are endless discussions of the question
of personality and politics. Such discussions can often be interpreted
as a consequence of the revolutionary defeats and failures of recent
decades. A concept of personality was implied in the thinking of some
of the outstanding Irish rebels of the nineteenth century. This is seen
in the idea of the nation in Irish culture which was held by some of
the nineteenth-century Irish rebels. The Young Irelanders saw in
culture—in poetry, balladry, literature—a means of whipping,
lashing, encouraging the Irish into a feeling of pride and dignity in
their own manhood. [2] Such a
conception is unmistakable in the writings of Thomas Davis, or in the
cultural writings of John Mitchel. A clear illustration is the
introduction which Mitchel wrote to the poetry of James Clarence
Mangan. Briefly, these men desired a nation of men, men in a
qualitative sense of that word. Their desires motivated a trust in the
potentialities of their fellow countrymen. And their trust was not
confined to their ideas on culture, but was also integral in their
political words and deeds. This trust underscored their lack of fear of
violence and force. They tried to use all the means at their command to
rouse the Irish people. When arrested, Lalor proudly flung the word,
“felon” back into the faces of his jailers. After his arrest, and just
prior to his deportation, John Mitchel refused to sign a statement
urging his followers not to attempt his rescue from jail. The aim of
national independence signified a nation of individuals with dignity;
it envisaged an Ireland in which Irishmen would attain “the full
stature of humanity.” Samuel Johnson once remarked that “Patriotism is
the last refuge of a scoundrel.” This is often true, yet it is
sometimes false. In nineteenth-century Ireland, patriotism was a first
step on the road to manhood.

These comments should suggest aspects of the tradition which James
Connolly represented in the Ireland of his day. The first Irish
Marxist, he was the heir, the continuator and the expositor of this
tradition. His real predecessors were those who did not sacrifice the
social question for the political question; he fused both aspects of
the Irish national tradition in his own works and in his own political
life. He was an extraordinary figure during the early years of the
twentieth century, not only in the Irish movement, but more broadly in
the world movement for workers’ emancipation. The intellectual fruits
of his life are to be found in his work Labour in Ireland.
This book is not only fundamental for a study of modern Irish history,
it is also a contribution to the world library of socialist thought.

James Connolly has been the subject of a recent biography by R.M.
Fox, an English socialist. Mr Fox has lived in Ireland for years, and
is widely read in the history and the literature of Ireland. Besides
this recent book, James Connolly: The Forerunner, Fox
has written other books on Ireland. His volume Green Banners
is a story of Irish struggles, valuable for its assemblage of facts and
material. His work The Irish Citizen Army is valuable
for similar reasons, and, also, because it serves as a reminder of the
significance of this organization, the first army of the working class
in the twentieth century. It was written at the request of the
organization of veterans of the Irish Citizen Army. Relatively few
Englishmen are capable of writing objectively about Ireland and about
the personalities of the Irish movement. Mr Fox, like Raymond Postgate,
author of an excellent biography of Robert Emmet, is something of an
exception. He brings sympathy, energy, command of the facts, and
knowledge of the history of the British and the European socialist
movements to his work. At the same time, I feel it necessary to note
that he sometimes succumbs to that parochialism which is fairly
pervasive in Irish political thinking. (I would add parenthetically
that there was no parochialism in Connolly.) His sympathy seems to fall
over into an emotional identification with the Irish which, at times,
is not devoid of localism and even sentimentality. And with this, his
identification is part of the process whereby he establishes Irish
nationalism as a criterion of judgment. Unlike Connolly, his biographer
has not “fused” his socialist ideas with his adopted Irish nationalism.

However, it seems to me that there is an integral connection between
Fox’s virtues and his deficiencies. His writings can help to revive
interest in the social side of the Irish tradition. He is retelling the
story of the Irish struggle, refreshing memories concerning Connolly
and the Irish Citizen Army, and emphasizing the best elements in the
Irish tradition.

Fox’s lucid account of the life of Connolly is based on the best
sources, On the one hand, Fox offers paraphrases of Connolly’s ideas,
and gives full quotations from his writings; on the other hand, his
recitation of the events in Connolly’s life definitely conveys a sense
of the man. Fox writes: “The story of the poor boy who becomes rich and
successful has always made a strong appeal. But this is a story of far
greater splendor—of a boy who did not become rich and yet his career
remains an inspiration to all who strive for social justice.” [3] It is the story of James
Connolly. The son of poor parents, he was a self-educated worker.
Forced emigration from Ireland was no hearsay tale for him. Both
Connolly and his father could find work in England or Scotland, but not
in Ireland, where, before their time, the English had seen to it that
manufacturing could not exist. His own family story was but part of the
general story of forced emigration from Ireland. He was born in a
gloomy Irish cabin in 1870. [4]
His father was a farm laborer. The family had to leave Ireland for
Scotland. There, he became a child laborer. At one time, he was placed
on a box in the factory in order that he might appear to be taller than
he was when the factory inspector came around. While still a youth, he
worked at many jobs. He did work of the type which destroys the health
and morale of men and women, let alone boys. He studied history,
politics, literature, by candle light in an Irish cabin, or in a city
tenement after harsh hours of work. He studied Marx, and his economic
views were based on Marx, particularly on Capital. He
became a Socialist in Scotland while still in his teens. But in his
first period as a Socialist, he was quiet and did not thrust himself
forward. He listened, observed, studied, learned what he could from
older comrades before he came forth to assert and express his own
views. When, in his youth, he did step forward, he became one of the
leading Socialists in Glasgow. He married, worked as a Socialist,
shared the hard life of the workers. In 1897, Connolly returned to
Ireland to organize for Socialism. He lived there as did the exploited
workers, and founded the Irish Republican Socialist Congress. As early
as 1900, he participated in international socialist congresses, and at
these meetings he generally supported the left wing. In Dublin, he
played the role of an agitator, an organizer and an editor. He shared
in the organization of the famous anti-British demonstrations in the
year of the jubilee of Queen Victoria. In 1904, he came to America.
Here, he worked at various jobs including that of an insurance agent,
and he participated in the activities of the American labor and
socialist movements. He was associated with Daniel De Leon, with the
Industrial Workers of the World, and later, with the Socialist Party in
the time of Eugene V. Debs. He had political disagreements with De Leon
and these were exacerbated because he was a practicing Catholic. His
experiences in America were of prime importance in his later career.
Here, he saw, at first hand, the capitalism in an advanced country.
This helped him to see the problems of Ireland more clearly than could
many of his contemporaries. Here also his association with the IWW
showed lasting influences. His own conceptions of industrial unionism,
as well as of strike tactics and agitational methods, were all
influenced by the Wobblies.

Connolly returned to Ireland in 1910 and became an organizer in
Belfast for the Irish Transport Workers Union, playing a major role in
the organization and the development of the Irish Labor movement in the
North of Ireland. He became associated with Jim Larkin, and went to
Dublin to participate in the leadership of the Dublin transport strike.
He helped to organize the Irish Citizen Army, led it in the Easter
Rebellion, was wounded during the fighting, and was one of the leaders
who was executed. He was carried to his execution in a chair because of
his wounds. When his wife visited him for the last time, he tried to
comfort her. Telling her not to cry, he added: “Hasn’t it been a full
life? And isn’t this a good end?” On learning that his son had been in
jail, his face lit up, and he remarked: “He was in the fight ... He has
had a good start in life, hasn’t he?” [5]

In most of the photographs of Connolly, he looks like an ordinary,
almost an undistinguished, man. Judging from these pictures, he might
be any Irish bar tender, small business man, craftsman. He was a
simple, quiet man, careful, precise, thoughtful and determined. Capable
in theory although self-taught, he was also highly practical. No Irish
contemporary of his could match his qualities, his strategical
understanding and his extremely clear sense of tactics. He studied with
the most practical of aims: in order to learn how best to carry forward
the Irish struggle. And, in turn, he saw the Irish struggle as part of
the struggle of the workers all over the world. He studied the
revolutions of the past in Ireland and on the continent in order to
teach himself, and the Irish, how they might strike their own blows for
freedom most effectively. In various articles, he tried to bring the
experiences of other countries to the Irish. Democratic, both in theory
and practice, he asked every member of the Irish Citizen Army if they
wanted to go through with the fight they were going to make in the
Easter Rebellion. They did.

A few personal anecdotes and stories about Connolly will perhaps
best give a sense of the man. These are taken from Mr. Fox’s book and
from other sources. Connolly’s daughter, Nora Connolly O’Brien, wrote a
moving personal account of her father, Portrait of a Rebel
Father, which well might be read in conjunction with Mr. Fox’s
biography. It is personal and intimate, and the emotions motivating it
are truly beautiful. In Portrait of a Rebel Father,
Nora Connolly O’Brien tells how once at Mass, the priest violently
denounced Connolly in a sermon. Although Connolly was not mentioned, it
was clear to him and to his daughter, and also to many others present,
that he was the object of this attack. The daughter was disturbed and
distressed; she wanted to squirm, to do something. But Connolly sat
unruffled, listening with no sense of strain or agitation showing on
his face. Afterwards, she asked him why he had not done anything, why
he had not at least walked out of the church? He answered: “Well, Nora,
because they lose their dignity, we don’t have to lose ours.”

In 1915, during the course of a strike on the Dublin quays, the
police were harassing the strikers. Clerks had been forced to work as
scabs. Connolly, on learning of the continued police treatment of the
workers, declared that this would have to stop. He called out a squad
of the Irish Citizen Army. They reported for duty wearing their dark
green uniforms, and armed with rifles and bayonets. They marched to the
picket line in formation; there, they marched along at the side of the
pickets, informing the police that they had come to protect their
striking class brothers. The pickets were no longer molested; the
clerks inside fled. Soon after this incident the strike was settled.

Not long before the Easter Rebellion, the British sent the police
out to raid rebel papers, and to confiscate copies of these and the
equipment used in printing them. The police arrived at Liberty Hall,
headquarters of the Irish Transport Workers, and, also, of the Irish
Citizen Army. Connolly asked them if they had a warrant. They had none.
He drew his revolver and declared that they would not be allowed to
search the hall. When they returned with a warrant in order to search
the premises for copies of nationalist papers, Connolly, revolver in
hand, stood by the door leading into the room in which was printed the
paper that he edited. He told the police that he would shoot the man
who entered this room, insisting that the warrant did not apply to it.
The police searched the rest of Liberty Hall, found no nationalist
papers, and departed. Connolly’s paper was, at that time, not
suppressed. Following this raid, Connolly sent out orders for the
mobilization of the members of the Irish Citizen Army. Irish workers
downed their tools, left wagons in the streets and rushed to Liberty
Hall. Some even swam the Liffey to get there. They reported in working
clothes, rifles in hand.

Connolly was arrested during the labor battles of 1913. He went on a
hunger strike, and was released from prison, weak from want of food.
Once when he was lecturing in America, he was interviewed by a
reporter. This journalist had questioned other Irishmen, and many had
claimed that they were descended from the kings of Ireland. More
generally, the journalist had a fixed notion that Irishmen always
boasted of the grandeur of their country and of their own ancestry. He
asked Connolly a question about his ancestors, and added that he wanted
to know if they had owned estates or castles in the old country.
Connolly answered: “I have no ancestors. My people were poor and
obscure like the workers I am speaking to now.” [6] Recalling his youth and his early readings, he once
said: “I always remember the first time I sent ... for a bundle of Penny
Readings and how delighted I was when they came ... It was
always so difficult for me to get to read as a boy that I thought it
wonderful to receive a parcel like this.” [7]

When he led the Irish Citizen Army out for the Easter Rebellion, he
told the members that they would be given the post of honor: they would
attack. And he also told them to keep their rifles because some of
those (the Nationalists) with whom they were joining to fight, would
not be willing to go as far as the workers must go: they might need
their rifles again.

Connolly was a man of genuine simplicity and of deep humanity. No
problem of the Irish workers was too small for him to give it his
attention. No sacrifice was too great for him when his ideas were at
stake. His writings were clear, simple, direct, and marked by flashes
of genuine eloquence. Labour in Irish History and The
Re-Conquest of Ireland were written over long periods of time
under conditions of great difficulty. He had to work for his own
living, and to carry on his practical political activities. He had none
of the leisure of the trained scholar or the professional intellectual.
The completion of these works was, in fact, a triumph of his own will,
a revelation of his persistence and determination. And these books are,
as Robert Lynd stated, “of infinite importance to Ireland.” [8] Their importance is not solely to
Ireland, but to the whole world.

Notes

1. From Lalor’s Faith
of a Felon, as quoted in James Connolly, Labour in
Ireland (Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1917), p.188.

2. Farrell’s Note:
I am well aware that this statement can raise (all over again)
questions concerning literature and propaganda. Inasmuch as I have
dealt in detail with these questions in A Note on Literary
Criticism and in other writings, I shall not go into them here
where the discussion would raise side issues. It might be said,
however, that men such as Mitchel and Thomas Davis revealed the best
taste of their times. To criticize their taste, ex post facto,
is merely to quarrel vainly with history and to raise sterile
questions. The concept of the nation in Irish culture has remained to
the present day, although this concept has gone through various
permutations. But it should be added that taste does not flow directly
out of concepts. The fact that Irish rebels such as John Mitchel had a
political conception of culture in Ireland does not mean that they were
crude in their reading habits.